Once started it is exceedingly difficult to avoid quoting extensively. One feels in all that he says that Dr Johnson had at any rate cleared his mind of cant and proved to the hilt the truth of his aphorisms. You will have noticed how clear-cut and simple they are, clothed in language poles removed from that which tradition has chosen to associate with the "sesquipedalian lexicographer." What sanity of outlook and healthiness of mind is expressed in such a robust sentence as "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it"; or, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." What joy we feel in the thought that to appreciate such talk as his we need not be literary: it is enough to be English. "Books without the knowledge of life are useless; or what should books teach but the art of living?" We can trust a man who talks like that.
But it is not only for his superb common sense that we love Dr Johnson; it is for the complete portrait of a complex character, rich in virtue, human in its failings and limitations, that we owe Boswell an unpayable debt of gratitude. "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history." How well do we all recall that exquisite summing up of Macaulay. No novelist would dare to give us so paradoxical a picture. Here is a man full of reverence and piety who yet touches the posts as he walks to avert evil; a man notorious for his brusquerie and lack of manners, who describes himself as "well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity," and of whom Goldsmith said that he had nothing of the bear but his skin; a man far more apprehensive of death than most of us, who yet took the knife out of the surgeon's hands in order to operate on himself; afflicted by terrible diseases, he was yet one of the most jovial and sociable men of his age; by nature sluggish and averse from work, he yet did more actual drudgery than any ten ordinary mortals.
Practically starving himself, he yet clothed, housed and fed a multitude of ingrates; the great literary dictator of his time, he failed almost entirely to appreciate poetry, and (most paradoxical of all) the great giant of letters of the eighteenth century he has yet left practically nothing that the ordinary man ever reads. "This is the greatness of Johnson, that he is greater than his works. He thought of himself as a man, not as an author ... duties and friendships and charities were more to him than fame and honour." But the wise man will not be content with the greatness of the man; "the reader who desires to have Johnson to himself for an hour, with no interpreter, cannot do better than turn to the notes on Shakespeare. They are written informally and fluently; they are packed full of observation and wisdom; and their only fault is that they are all too few."
It is hard to imagine that anyone who has read the noble preface to the Dictionary, the illuminating preface to and notes on Shakespeare, the thrilling Life of Richard Savage, and a selection of the sage essays in The Rambler and The Idler should rest content until he had read Johnson from end to end. This, then, is why one should read Boswell; you will get a full-length picture of the typical Englishman at his greatest, a lesson on the art of life, and an appetite to read the works of one of the sanest, "all-round" writers who ever lived.
V
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.... I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion," writes Charles Lamb to Robert Southey, but "I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does."
We read Lamb and Johnson and Pepys for their lovableness; we read Hazlitt for his intensity of passion, his vigorous hate, his sense of glorious enjoyment, his unstudied ease of manner, his healthy attitude to literature, his enduring freshness and his stimulating criticism.
There is little in his life history to endear him to us; he was unfortunate in his relations with the three women who came into his life: "I have wanted one thing only to make me completely happy, but lacking that I lack all"; he was an impossible friend; he even managed to quarrel with Lamb, and though he was an acute and brilliant lecturer, there was little sympathy between him and his audience. The early part of the nineteenth century was the worst possible time for a shy, over-sensitive and easily irritated writer to work in; the obscenities of the Blackwood's Magazine clique have left an ineradicable stain—but when they speak of Hazlitt "as rather an ulcer than a man," even after this lapse of time our gorge rises; one ceases to wonder at the vitriolic bitterness which he wastes on his enemies.